BIRD IN A TRAIN STATION
Q&A with
Singer/Songwriter Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables
By Cynthia Mitchell
Dawn McCarthy
CYNTHIA MITCHELL: My question is --
what do you think of faeries, forest spirits and such beings? Do you believe in
them? Have you seen them?
DAWN McCARTHY: Early on I was
sure that faeries and things existed and felt them in the surrounding foliage
on walks - later the modern world loomed larger and made me doubt.
During a particular enchanted time
of life (16-17) while running around the Madison,
WI Arboretum with friends, we watched silently as a bouncing large
ball of light came down the trail toward us, but turned before we could get
very close. That's the only concrete experience.
But when I see drawings of faerie
tales – old, gnarled, dark drawings (Mother Goose
included) I always get a tremendous sense of familiarity and reckoning.
Most recently, I came across a book
called "Earth Light" by RJ
Stewart about the Underworld Tradition – the stuff that is at the base of
nearly every culture and religion – symbols, archetypes, stories, ballads – just
what all that collective folklore is about. We know so much of collective
folklore without ever being exposed to things via books or people. There's a
reason for that. It’s ultra-animism and environmentalism and involves your
heritage and particular areas of land - any land can work.
With this book, I experienced an affinity and deja vu I'd never
known with any "tradition" or religion -- although God knows, I've
tried -- a sense of animism and creaturely beckoning forms that had been with
me my whole life. It seems I had to read this book before I could begin
recording Mother
Twilight. It also described a role of a singer/balladeer. That was the
first time ever I read my feelings of what I'm doing, my role on paper.
Hmmm…could I recall that exactly
now? I don't think so. Something about the collector, keeper and teller of
gathered...recipes.
So I like to believe in them
[faeries], yes. I certainly feel forms out there and in here — and think they
can take whatever likeness we respond to. My favorite forms are the gnarled,
ruddy types. Personally, I wish they'd come by and see me sometimes.
CYNTHIA: Some music is
about the world that is common to us all and some music is for a different
world and requires that the listener go there to enjoy it. Your music is of the
different world variety. Could you say anything about the nature of the world
your songs invoke? What does it look like?
DAWN: It is a world
that has nipped at my toes and gut (an area of shifting electricity my whole life)
for as long as I can remember. My first memories were of nightmares of being
left, betrayed, in dark places and in danger. At the pit of me is a fear and
uncertainty of the place I've arrived at.
The elements trouble me – especially
when I wish to know them more and they feel opaque. When the world is not
troubling, it is wondrously mysterious and powerful - all along bursting with
great merry characters to give you important clues. My humor/manic-ness
certainly feels like a complementary side to my terror/mystery.
What I sing from is often a place of
exile that I am working to return from and describe it to others, or it’s a
place I am working to return back to, to where my nature leads me, like a
homecoming. It’s full of elements and what I like to feel is a voice that is
going beyond my own personality and lifetime. But not to make it ethereal or
generic, it’s just that I often feel beyond my own lifetime, flying around like
a bird out of sorts caught in a train station flapping about. The voice begins
with an ache, fear, fancy or manic-ness.
Hmm, I bet that's real clear! I'd
like to hear what my songs evoke for others, because I think I'm too inside it
to see!
CYNTHIA: With all the
different kinds of art you do, drawing, sculpture, and music, and with the
sensibility of your music which I think is about a total experience, I wonder
if you have translated your works into theatre or if you have any intention to.
DAWN: This is in fact
what I hope my work will unfold into in the next chapter. You've hit the nail
on the head! Faun Fables will be doing our first full music theatre piece
showing in San Francisco in Sept. 2002.
CYNTHIA: Some of your
lyrics could stand alone as poetry, which is very unusual. Do you read poetry? Anyone you especially love?
DAWN: I don't get
around to reading poetry much.
But I can mention Anna Swir, a Polish writer.
I came across her stuff during a particularly existential time while traveling
(important to do when passing through - looking at what’s on the shelves of
where you're staying at) and she made the tears leap from my eyes. She deals
frankly and passionately with the troubled, riddled relations between soul/mind
and flesh/mortality via themes of love, sex, motherhood and war.
CYNTHIA: It says in your
liner notes that Faun Fables came out of your solo travels in Europe. What was
it about being there that made you write these songs?
DAWN: I left my band
and set up in NYC tremendously hungry and searching. It was a vision I'd had
years before but it seemed too far-fetched: to study song in different
locations and cultures and see where it led me. I had nervous illnesses –
anxiety and low blood sugar, this all made me very tunnel-visioned, obsessed
and open. At times I went around and let creatures in the different areas tell
me things, when the land was beautiful. It couldn't help but become an
underworld tale, set in a frazzled nervous system.
CYNTHIA: “Hela” sounds
like a love song to me, sort of the inverse of Black
Sabbath's N.I.B. I read that Hela is an underworld
goddess, could you say more about what “Hela”
is and why it's “Hela” you are singing to?
DAWN: The first lyric
of that song was "healer," and then while playing it for bandmates,
they said "we thought the lyric was ‘hela’" and I liked that better,
because it was a code word. Cause when things are too spelled out, they become
limited, dead almost. Better to sense something happening to you and you don't
know why – it's fresh that way instead of dogmatic.
That song has a number of uncanny
coincidences. To hear now from you that it is an underworld goddess! The first
two chords of that song – simple, repetitive, were written looking out behind
an old farmhouse in Scotland being moved by the sweet rolling green. I'd begun
seeing the light at the end of the tunnel at that point, and felt in fact this
warm persona in the pit of darkness, after flailing about, lost for a long
time. The kind of presence that lets you know the maze is rigged so that there's
no way you can get lost forever. It IS a love song.
CYNTHIA: Years ago I
bought a mysterious record in a thrift store for a mutual friend of ours, Danny Tunick.
It's a record by a Polish singer named Ewa Demarczyk. (Another
Polish powerhouse! – Cynthia) Danny tells me that this record was
inspirational to you. What do you make of Ewa Demarczyk?
DAWN: Bravo! You're the
one that turned us all onto Ewa Demarczyk, I often wondered who that key
character was. Many thanks to you! Ewa has been a vocal mentor for me for a few
years now. She is fragile, experimental, theatrical, demonic, triumphant....
She possesses that knowledge of
darkness that is so essential for getting into the depths of life. I want to
record "Carousel
with Madonnas" in English and hope to make some contact with her soon.
I will send her my songs and hope for the best. What a great musical
environment she worked in - so experimental for even today's time. I'd like to
know more about it! [Maybe a future article in God Magazine? – Patrick]
CYNTHIA: “Traveler
Returning” is very moving to me, it seems to me that it's about returning to a
state of being more than to a person or a place. Could you say what it's about?
DAWN: It’s about being
at home in nature again and thus life after disorienting big city life. Well,
it’s a prayer to return to that, it’s not quite there yet – so it’s sad with an
ache. It was written alongside “Hela” and the two are really two parts to the
same plea.
CYNTHIA: “Beautiful Blade”
makes me feel ill when I listen to it, like I have seasickness. How did you do
that?
DAWN: It's how falling
deliriously, dangerously in love made me feel! This song reminds me the most of
how me and my sisters used to sing as spazzy children.
It’s about Nils Frykdahl, [the other half of Faun Fables
and also a member of the Sleepytime Gorilla
Museum]. When we fell in love, we lived on opposite coasts and there was a
long distance time period. This song was written while I waited to see him
again, touring via Greyhound bus toward California where he lived.
[This interview was conducted in two parts – once after the interviewer
heard Faun Fables’ recorded music in early March, and the second after she saw
them play live at Galapagos in Brooklyn on March 29, 2002.]
[The following questions were
written after seeing Faun Fables perform two nights in a row. On the first
night, while playing the song “Live Old,” Dawn scrutinized her face in a
compact finally drawing in all the lines where they would eventually appear on
her face and neck. After the performance a group of people went out to eat and
Dawn kept the lines on her face as if it were the most natural thing in the
world for a woman to go out on the town with deep black age lines drawn into
the rest of her makeup. There was something simply elegant about this to me,
especially in New York where women hone their looks like sharp knives. - Cynthia]
CYNTHIA: Speaking of “Live Old,” you said that you sometimes write
the song you need to hear. Could you say more about that idea: Does the same
principle apply to other art forms?
DAWN: I think it always
does - meaning, you make the art you need to experience. In the case of “Live
Old,” it was stuff I knew to be true, but I didn't live as if I did, so I began
writing a song for it. Songs have a funny way of coming true. And that song has
helped ever since!
CYNTHIA: In your performance
the other night, you used lyrics taken from one of your sisters at 14; a 5-year-old
you worked with; your favorite checkout clerk, who had lost her son; and tapes
of your best friend at 12 speaking to you and playing music.
Your use of these people's words
does not come across as voyeuristic, which it easily could, and it seems clear
that you don't need to rely on other people to supplement your output. I was
thinking that love and something else is the motivation. Could you talk about
how you choose to use other people's words in your performances?
DAWN: You've noticed a
theme with childhood that I only recently noticed while introducing songs.
People just say the freshest, unpretentious, darndest things when they're
young.
Things jump out at me and strike me,
and I know instantly I must use them for something. Wish I had more to tell you
on that theme, but it’s still quite subconscious for me. I think if I'm moved
to sing them, I want to embody them, not just describe them. It's always been
my approach, it’s the only way that's satisfying.
The song for my cashier friend was a
different experience, because it was so personal for her and I didn't know him.
But it’s a pretty hard topic to not feel any emotion for, even if only telling of
it.
CYNTHIA: Listening to your
albums Early Song and Mother Twilight, I wouldn't have expected
you to be as funny as you are. Some of your songs are very playful and witty --
and your puppet show had me screaming with laughter! Have you experienced a
lightening of spirits in recent times or are you just funny in person?
DAWN: It's true that
our recordings do not represent the wacky playful side much. And sometimes I
have to explain that to promoters while booking. Perhaps this will come more
with future recordings.
In general, I don't like just taking
all the songs I know at a time period and making that the current CD. It has
got to be a selection that goes together, like a story. The story of Early
Song is that it was the first songs I was performing and singing solo after
I left my band, and Mother Twilight you know about already.
Also, when I think about it – humor and wackiness strikes me as a
live entertainment thing. I think it works best while tending an audience –
“This Bliss” on Early Song is the nearest thing I've recorded with humor. Yes –
I think I instinctively feel just that
- crowds bring out my humor.
CYNTHIA: How did you and
Nils discover each other and what have you learned from him and he from you in
terms of music, art, and performance? You appear to share the stage very
comfortably with each other while both being spellbinding to watch. Has this
equilibrium come naturally or have you had to sort of work it out?
DAWN: We saw each other
perform at a festival – a year and a half later he came through NYC on a tour
and that was that. We were huge fans of each other's work and knew what we
hoped to learn from each other.
From him, I was inspired to attack
theatrical schemes amidst a music show and finally had a partner-in-crime to
help me. I wanted a more honest intent with the audience – I'd come to a wall
of what I was able to create with the crowd because I was always afraid to
admit that I cared. And he felt very strong about grabbing the audience and
seeing the role of entertainer as sacred. Musically, I learned how to be more
compositional with my songs – although I've been careful to not lose my own
songwriting vision, which is so different from his.
Nils just said that from me he's
learning how to carry a tune!
Our thang on stage I'd say has
definitely grown with time. I recall being quite hopeful and awkward – still
do.
CYNTHIA: We talked about being close
to the elements and I have thought while listening to your music that I was
hearing vibrations from under the earth. How important is nature to your art?
DAWN: Nature is like the great wall
I keep knocking on trying to find its keys to the kingdom. It seems to inspire
me musically when it troubles me or haunts me.u
Live Old
(Copyright 2001 Dawn McCarthy, from the album “Mother Twilight”)
Time will slow you down
If you’re lucky
A chance to be ground
Into the earth
The wind playing with your sands
Before you leave this land
Impatience kills good chance
Slow
down
Better not count on winning
There may be no race
Better not scorn the old
Wisdom may need a slower pace
When the pressures
Of youth are gone
Sing a vaster song
What mattered so much
Time seeded with its touch
Something age brings
With invisible things
Freed from broken dreams
Grow old
Better not kill it in youth
You might pass through that portal
Better not count on dying
You just might be immortal
It seems a long wait
For treasure beyond the gate
And your looks and prizes
Aren’t worth taking with you
The trumpet blares
Of youthly cares
Might obscure that view
There’s
more